Friday afternoon, three screens and a guess
It is half past four on Friday. A solicitor has a blank timesheet for Wednesday and Thursday, a sent items folder, a call log from the phone system and a vague memory of a long call with a client that might have been Tuesday. They piece it together, round everything to the nearest half hour and move on, knowing full well that the six-minute calls and the quick email replies are not in there.
Your practice management system has a timer, and some people use it. Most do not, because starting and stopping a timer every time the phone rings is not realistic when your day is made of interruptions.
Why timers and reminders do not fix it
The usual response is a policy: record time daily, use the timer, the practice manager will chase. It helps for a few weeks. The underlying problem is that the evidence of the work is spread across Outlook, the phone system, the document management system and the practice management system, and none of them talk to the timesheet.
A fee earner reconstructing their day is doing a data matching job by hand: which email relates to which matter, how long that call really was, whether the draft they edited counts as one unit or four. People are bad at that at the end of a week, and understandably they undercount rather than guess high.
Where the lost time goes
| Activity | Why it goes unrecorded |
|---|---|
| Short emails and replies | Too small to remember, too many to add up |
| Incoming and outgoing calls | Taken between other tasks, duration not noted |
| Document drafting and review | Spread across several sittings on different days |
| Attendance notes typed later | The time is recorded for the note, not the meeting |
On a fixed fee matter this may not change the bill, but it hides how much the matter really cost to run, so your fixed fees drift away from reality. On hourly matters it is chargeable work simply not billed. Either way, management figures on utilisation and matter profitability are built on estimates.
How we build time capture that fee earners will use
- Activity feed: with each person's consent and your firm's policy in place, we read metadata from Microsoft 365 (sent and received emails, calendar entries, Teams calls), call records from your phone system where it offers an API, and document save events from your document management system.
- Matter matching: each activity is matched to a matter using the matter reference in the subject line, the email addresses of the client and other side, the document's folder, and the calendar entry's title. Where it cannot tell, it asks rather than guesses.
- Draft entries: the fee earner sees a daily list of suggested time entries, grouped by matter, with the activity behind each one and a proposed duration in your firm's units.
- Quick confirm: they edit the narrative, change the duration or discard the entry, then confirm. Confirmed entries post to Clio, LEAP, Actionstep or your system through its API.
- Nothing automatic: no entry is posted without the fee earner confirming it. The system prepares; the person decides.
We keep the content of emails and documents out of the time entry unless your firm wants a short summary in the narrative. Most firms prefer a narrative the fee earner writes or approves.
A different end to the week
Instead of reconstructing two days from memory, a fee earner spends a few minutes at the end of each day ticking through a list that is mostly right. The short calls and emails are there because the system saw them. Supervising partners get time recorded when it happened, which makes WIP reports and fixed fee reviews more honest.
For the practice manager, the weekly chase becomes a look at who has unconfirmed entries rather than who has empty timesheets.
You will recognise this if
- Most time is entered at the end of the week or the month.
- Fee earners admit they do not record short calls and emails.
- Fixed fee matters seem to take longer than the fee assumed, but nobody can show it.
- Your practice manager spends time chasing timesheets.
- Utilisation figures are not trusted by the partners.